process heat

Jaco Kriek has been the CEO of PBMR Pty LTD of South Africa for five years. On July 7, 2009 he spoke with me for nearly an hour about a wide range of topics.

The topics we discussed included the following:

History of PBMR as a stand alone company

Change in technical direction

Customer focused design efforts

Licensing challenges for unfamiliar nuclear technology

Potential for process heat supply market

Interest from petrochemical industry

Interest from American company talking about unit volumes in the thousands

PBMR as a national technical asset for South Africa

Hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did. PBMR has a unique role in the nuclear industry and might be pointing the way to new sources of revenues and new customers that have never before considered using atomic fission as their heat source.

Bonne Posma wants to use heat from atomic reactors as part of a process of cleanly converting coal into a liquid hydrocarbon – either diesel fuel or jet fuel depending on the market demands.

Bonne Posma is a serial entrepreneur whose latest company is called Liquid Coal, Inc.. He has developed a concept for using the heat from high temperature reactors as a way to improve the cleanliness of well known chemical processes for converting coal – which is mostly carbon and hydrogen – into a liquid hydrocarbon. The process requires adding hydrogen to coal since it is deficient in that element compared to the hydrocarbons that exist as liquids.

The idea has been around a long time, but the traditional process burns some of the input coal to provide heat. Not only does that reduce the amount of liquid fuel produced per unit of coal mined, but it also releases vast quantities of pollutants. Bonne recognizes the value of liquid hydrocarbon as an almost irreplaceable building block of modern society and he strongly believes that processes that make it cleanly have incredible value for today and for the future.